From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

683 Drawing the official Bluetooth logo

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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683 Drawing the official Bluetooth logo

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to create the industry standard bluetooth logo complete with this modified oval, and we're going to do so using one of my favorite newer tools inside Illustrator, the join tool. So, you will need to be working inside Illustrator CC. All right, so I'll go and switch over to this document which contains a couple of center guides, And then I'll go up to the view menu and make that my smart guides are turned on. And next, you want to go ahead and select the rectangle tool from shape tool flyout menu and then notice that my cursor is telling me I can't draw on this layer and that's because it's locked. So what I need to do is create a new layer by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac and clicking on a little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll call this guy primitives because these are going to be our primitive path outlines, and I'll change the color to gold and then I'll click OK. All right, now I'll go ahead and position my cursor at the intersection of those two guides and I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click to bring up the rectangle dialogue box and I'm looking for width and height values of 280 points, which I figured out through trial and error. And now I click OK in order to create this square. All right, now I don't want it to be filled, so I'll click on this first swatch up here on the far left side of the control panel and I'll change it to none. And then, I'll click on the second color swatch and change it to this dark shade of blue. And then, I'll go ahead and select the line weight value and take it up to 42 points. Now, I'll select the rotate tool, which you can get by pressing the R key and I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialogue box. I'm looking for an angle value of 45 degrees, at which point I'll click OK. And the reason I'm doing this by the way is this is going to ensure that I have exactly diagonal segments. Alright now I'm going to grab the line segment tool, which you can select from the line tool flyout menu, and I'll go ahead and once again position my cursor at the intersection of those two guides and I will drag upward while pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac and that's going to ensure that I'm drawing my line from the center outward, and I just want it to be a vertical line that's taller than a square. And you may have better luck with that if you add the shift key so I'm pressing shift and alt here on the PC, or shift and option on a Mac, at which point I end up with this vertical line. Alright now I'm going to press the A key to switch to my white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the direct selection tool and I'll marquee this segment right here to select it independently of the other segments in the square and I'll press control C, followed by control F, that's command C, command F on a Mac in order to copy this segment and paste it in front. And then with my white arrow still selected, I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the move dialogue box. You want to drop down to the distance value, recall that my square measures 280 points wide by 280 points tall and so I want to change this distance value here, we're not working with the horizontal and vertical values, we want to be working with the distance value and so I'll change it to 280 divided by two, so slash two like so and then when you press the tab key, Illustrator will go ahead and do the math. So 280 divided by two is 140, after which point you want to change the angle value to 180 degrees plus 45, like so and then press the tab key and that will go ahead and update the angle so it reads 225 degrees which will place this diagonal line exactly where we want it. After which point, click OK to accept that change. Now, click on this top left anchor point to select it independently of the bottom right one and then press control K, or command K on a Mac to bring up the preferences dialog box. Confirm that the keyboard increment value is set to one point, in which case go ahead and click OK and then press shift, up arrow twice in a row, followed by shift left arrow, twice in a row which is going to move that anchor point 20 points up as well as 20 points to the left. Now we don't strictly speaking need to move this bottom right anchor point but it is going to make life easier 'cause it's going to move that center point as well and so I'll go ahead and click on the bottom right point and press shift down arrow twice in a row followed by shift right arrow twice in a row. Now press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool, up here at the top of the toolbox and then click on the line to select the entire thing and then you want to return to the rotate tool, click and hold on it and choose the reflect tool from the flyout menu. And now, just go ahead and press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac to bring up the reflect dialog box, change the axis to either vertical or horizontal, it's not going to matter in this case and then click on a copy button in order to make a copy of that path like so. Alright, now you want to make a duplicate of this layer by going over here to the layers panel, clicking on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the panel and choosing duplicate primitives. And then, go ahead and turn off the original primitives layer to protect it from harm and double click on an empty portion of this layer to bring up the layer options dialog box and I'm going to call this guy bluetooth and I'm also going to change the color to grass green and then I'll click OK. Alright now in the end, we do want the line weights to be set to 42 points but we're going to have an easier time with this next step if we reduce the line weights and so I'll press control A, or command A on the Mac to select all the artwork and then I'll take this line weight value down to two points, should work nicely, and I'm also going to turn off the guise layer just so I can better see what I'm doing. Alright now for the best results, click and hold on the eraser tool and select the scissors tool from the flyout menu and then click on this far left point to cut it in two, and click on the far right point as well. And so that goes ahead and divides these two bottom segments from these two top ones. Alright now, assuming that you're working with Illustrator CC, click and hold on the shaper tool in order to bring out this flyout menu and choose the join tool. And now you just want to drag across the stuff you want to get rid of. So the first drag should be something like that, notice that cuts that chunk away and then I'll drag right here to cut this stuff away and by the way, that also joins those segments together at the same time. So it's a huge time saver. Now go ahead and drag like that to get rid of those two guys and drag around here to get rid of the other two. And now if you press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and you click on any one of the segments, you will select all of them and they'll all be joined together into a single open path outline. At which point, go ahead and crank that line weight value back up to 42 points and you'll end up with this effect here. Alright, the next step is to create this modified oval right here and I'm going to start by selecting the ellipse tool from the shape tool flyout menu and then I'll alt or option click right there at the center of the artwork so far in order to bring up the ellipse style log box, I'm looking for a width value of 420 points and I want the height value to be 580 points, after which I'll click OK. And because I alt or option clicked, I'm creating the oval from the center out. Alright, now you want to switch back to your white arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the direct selection tool but you can get to it by pressing the A key for arrow. Alright now, partially marquee this top left segment and then it's looking like these control handles are a little hard to see, so I'm going to change the color of this layer by double clicking on it and selecting violet instead and then I'll click OK. And now notice the position of these control handles, which control the curvature of the segment. If I press shift up arrow twice in a row, that's going to move this vertical control handle and stretch the segment upwards slightly and then I'll press shift left arrow in order to move this horizontal control handle and stretch the segment outward. Alright now we need to partially marquee the top right segment and then I'll once again press shift up arrow twice in a row, followed by shift right arrow this time. And now I'll marquee the bottom right segment and I'll press shift down arrow twice in a row, followed by shift right arrow. And finally, I'll marquee this guy, the bottom left segment and I'll press shift down arrow twice in a row followed by shift left arrow once. Alright now, just go ahead and press the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool, click on the path to select the entire thing and I'm going to swap the fill and stroke by pressing shift X, so that's all you need to do there. Alright now this guy's at the top of the stack so I'm going to right click any old place in the document window, choose arrange and choose send to back. And then I'll try to find my Bluetooth symbol right there and I'll click on it to select it. And now I need to convert this stroke path outline to a fill and just so we can better see what we're doing, I'm going to change the color of this stroke for a moment and then I'll go up to the object menu, choose path and choose outline stroke, which is going to produce this effect right here and notice that we end up with a compound path in which these little triangles here are cut out of the larger path outline. Alright now, I'll shift click on that modify oval in the background and I will change the fill of these objects back to that dark blue like so, and then I'll return to the object menu, choose compound path and choose make and that will turn the Bluetooth symbol into a hole, after which point, I'll click off the artwork to deselect it. And that is how you draw the official Bluetooth logo with extreme accuracy, here inside Illustrator.

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